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Comment by voidUpdate | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to think that people don't want to be programmers anymore, they want to be managers who delegate their work to someone or something else, and then come back, critique the work, and do another loop

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And this is exactly the problem. Developers are happily passing off their biggest valuable asset to, essentially, their replacements while, at the same time, convincing themselves that them playing the "ideas guy" or "conductor" roles is the real value they bring to the table.

Like, get real!

I feel like I'm rapidly going insane. It wasn't that long ago when many people in this forum would boldly exclaim that their software development skills were their capital and take pride in their ability to build stuff. It also wasn't that long ago when the "ideas guys" were a meme here.

We're ceding almost all of our bargaining power because programming "was never valuable." And we're doing it with smiles from ear to ear.

I wonder about this too. HN in 2026 is barely recognizable anymore from how it was even 10 years ago. So many people loving mindless slop, so many people arguing against hacking on something for the sake of it, so many people seemingly hate programming on here now... So weird to witness.

I'm thinking back to my contracting days when a typical customer might have a team of ten people but only one or two did the bulk of the work. Now the whole team can be productive for whatever measure you use for productivity.

It's not so great for the one or two but fantastic for everybody else.

Well yeah! This is objectively a great process for getting a lot of work done.

I guess I'm an outlier then because I actually like programming, and I've never wanted to be a manager, even a manager of an LLM. At least half the fun of making software is doing the programming

You aren't an outlier. Most of us got into coding because we enjoyed coding, not writing documentation that talks about coding.

It feels like I am these days, with the amount of posts on here about how LLM-powered programming is the future and everyone should be doing it and it will make us all 10x developers

I enjoyed coding because of what it enabled me to _do_.

I can now do more with AI tooling so I enjoy that more.

I know lots of you enjoy coding for its own sake, more power to you. But it's no surprise to me that many (most?) view it as a means to an end.

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